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We speak too glibly and too innocently about innovation and disruption. Innovation does spawn some good things. Disruption and “creative destruction” can often be manipulated into something beneficial. But it's helpful not to get carried away.

The late Neil Postman, long one of my favorite writers, understood like few others how new developments alter our world subtly but powerfully—and often irreversibly. F0r instance, the advent of the mechanical clock in the 14th century “made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers,” he observed. The way it marked off our days and hours created a shift in our concept of reality, which had previously been bound to things like seasons and cycles and divine Providence. It speeded life up, a process that continues today.

And when a Cambridge tutor named William Farish decided in 1792 to become the first known person to assign a quantitative score rather than a qualitative assessment of students’ work, it symbolized another shift from one world to another one, Postman argued. Not from a worse world to a better one, mind you. Just from a natural world to a statistically obsessed one.

And indeed today there are few things that we’re able to comment on without seeking to quantify them. Wrote Postman:

Can you imagine, for example, a modern economist articulating truths about our standard of living by reciting a poem? Or by telling what happened to him during a late-night walk through East St. Louis? Or by offering a series of proverbs and parables, beginning with the saying about a rich man, a camel, and the eye of a needle? …

Yet these forms of language are certainly capable of expressing truths about economic relationships, as well as any other relationships, and indeed have been employed by various peoples. But to the modern mind, resonating with different media-metaphors, the truth in economics is believed to be best discovered and expressed in numbers.

But is a quantifiable age a superior one? Does it get us closer to the truth than in past ages? In many ways, no. Has anyone yet been able to unpack the numbers to show whether Obamacare is a boon or a burden? Instead, each partisan camp manipulates data to prove its own point.

Postman knew that today’s so-called experts are merely telling stories, “for the same reason the Buddha, Confucius, Hillel, and Jesus told their stories (and for the same reason D. H. Lawrence told his.”

The crucial difference is that the latter-day storytellers dress up their stories with stats and graphs to give them the veneer of scientific irrefutability.

What News Would Postman Deliver in 2014?

Postman died in 2003, and we’re left to wonder what he’d say if he had enough time to study the effects of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat and heaven knows what is still to come.

“Telephones in automobiles seem to me a very bad idea,” he remarked quaintly yet prophetically in 1996. “So does spending a lot of hours communicating on the Internet when one could use that time reading Cervantes' Don Quixote.”

He conceded that “cyberspace contributes to the decentralization of information, adding that “the Internet may well be a solution … but of course, like any solution creates new problems.”

So What’s ?

Society would do well to have more serious discussions about those tradeoffs--sooner rather than later.

It’s possible that some future developments will push society back to more subtle and complex views of reality. But in the meantime, we’re still headed fast in the opposite direction.

Still, each of us can navigate our new reality by taking a few important steps:

1. Accept that, to succeed, an important idea today must be interesting. Interesting, unimportant ideas will prevail over uninteresting but important ones. If you’re a marketer or entrepreneur or storyteller or civic leader, there’s no point in complaining. We just have to deal with it. (It’s one of the points I explore in this piece on the seven major trends currently shaping our world.)